The dispute between the Pharisees and Our Lord is being misrepresented. It was the Pharisees through their technical distortion of the meaning of the words of the law that were advocating a minimalist compliance with the natural and divine law. In fact, Our Lord came to demand a more rigorous application of the Law and the Prophets.

Perhaps you have experienced a similar ad hominem attack as I have when simply stating or defending the very simple dogma on marriage that has been held by Catholics everywhere and always (at least before the gnostic oracle of Cardinal Kasper came on the scene). Marriage is the union between one man and one woman which bond is broken only by the death of one of the spouses. Our grandparents would have considered inconceivable that such a simple and basic statement could become the source of ridicule and persecution by fellow Catholics. Yet, utter this truth today and you are likely to be confronted with something like the following: “You are being like the Pharisees. Christ came to bring mercy and the Pharisees stubbornly held on to the letter of the law rather than embracing Christ’s new spirit of mercy. Like the Pharisees of old you obstinately are refusing the law of mercy Pope Francis seeks to promote.”

If we cannot depend upon the official documents, whether “final” or “working” from our bishops for an accurate iteration of Catholic teaching,  then how are we to proceed at all?

So, those who are watching the incredible debacle the Synod on the Family is turning out to be – with the press office clamping down on the information on who is saying what in the Aula; issuing only vague and subjective “summaries” of the day’s talks; blowing smoke whenever anyone asks a difficult question - should probably not be blamed for being thoroughly un-shocked by the contents of the now-notorious “Relatio”.

Even most Catholics today do not realize that a number of Fathers of the First Vatican Council actually submitted a papal petition for Columbus’ canonization

Another Columbus Day has passed. The usual suspects in the secular, and now sadly even “Catholic” media have trotted out their yearly calumnies of the man whom America still, to her credit, honors with a National Holiday. There is still no better response to this yearly spectacle of hatred towards Columbus than the following statement of Rev. A. Knight from 1877, “The disapproval of the ‘Infidel Press’ is to Catholics a guarantee of the goodness of a cause second only to an autograph letter of the Holy Father.”

There is an old political axiom that has apparently been totally lost on the people in charge of the Synod: how something looks is often more important than what it is. In our times, the question asked most often by smart political advisors is "How does this look?" Optics, and how to avoid other people manipulating it for you, is particularly now in the age of Twitter at the heart of modern political life, but also seems to be one thing the Vatican simply can't grasp.

But what outsiders need to remember is that this is a very common problem in Italian politics in general. For centuries, Italian rulers have just done whatever they wanted, and whoever didn't like it could just go jump. The Italian national characteristic most abhorred by the other races is certainly their arrogance and total disinterest in anyone who does not seem immediately useful. Anyone who has ever taken a walk in Rome and had to stop and specifically ask the Romans crowded around the outside of the coffee bar to please move over the three inches required to pass on the sidewalk - and received the cold, blank Roman stare in response - will be familiar. They will often simply treat other people as though they are not there, and will pretend to be surprised when a person magically appears out of nowhere asking them to get out of the way.

WARNING: Mordant Commentary. Reader Discretion Advised.

A shockingly blunt title indeed. But as entirely predictable events unfold in the New Synod Hall—wherein, we are told, all things will be made new—why should we bother with nuance? After all, we have a Pope who is no friend of nuance and whose intentions could not have been more crudely expressed over the past eighteen months of astonishing insults and denigration of practically all the elements of apostolic and ecclesiastical tradition. Francis has clearly been preparing for this moment since the day of his election, if not before, and now it has arrived in all its inglorious splendor.

Let us call this Synod what it is: a secretive, manipulated, progressive-dominated cabal, led by septuagenarian and octogenarian diehards of the conciliar “renewal,” who are rushing to finish their “work”—so rudely interrupted by Pope Benedict—lest death release the Church from their clutches before they are quite done.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of St. Pius X’s death, I am re-printing an article originally written by the Rev. Simon FitzSimons and published in The American Catholic Quarterly Review in 1908. Over a century later, Rev. FitzSimons’ brilliant insight into the driving forces behind this heresy as well as its remedy are needed more than ever. Writing shortly after Pascendi was published Rev. FitzSimons is able to give us a unique “fly on the wall” perspective of a Catholic living at that time. In this fourth installment, Rev. FitzSimons exposes the fallacies behind the Modernist quest and explains why it is doomed to failure. Without further ado, I give you the Rev. SimonFitzSimons…Chris Jackson

“…they seem to forget that it has not been the Church's custom to remodel her beliefs to suit the epoch or to adapt them to the changing follies of the times; nay, that, on the contrary, her proudest boast is that she has remained unchanged in the midst of a constantly changing world; indeed, that her immutability is bound up in and inseparable from her indestructible vitality. They seem to overlook the important fact that if you change the essence of a religion, you have no longer the same religion, but a new one, and that when you expunge from a creed all that is vital you may indeed make a new creed, but you have the old one no longer.” Rev. Simon FitzSimons

The other day, a bishop in Algeria, the former head of the Dominican Order in France, Bishop Jean-Paul Vesco, on the website of the weekly magazine La Vie, made defense of the Kasper plan, to “pardon” those who have left their marriage, taken a civil “divorce” and entered into a second adulterous connection. The Catholic world is in turmoil over the possibility that this apparently common practice in Germany will be allowed formally throughout the world, and some powerful voices thunder against it, with the Pope, except for a few brief words of warm praise in the beginning, still silent.

Now we have the “pardon” instead of forgiveness of sins, covering instead of deleting them. Obviously, for the simple reason that repentance is difficult, too difficult for ordinary people.